A Vilnius court ruled to block the Lithuanian website of Russian news agency Sputnik which is part of the Rossiya Segodnya (Russia Today) media holding.
“The court sanctioned the decision on blocking the portal, it is coming into force,” the Radio and Television Commission of Lithuania (RTCL) said in its statement.
It is the media watchdog that initiated legal proceedings against Sputnik.
On July 10, the RTCL drew to the conclusion that the Sputnik website had repeatedly published contents of the Lithuanian national broadcaster’s news website lrt.lt without its consent.
Making the decision, they did not took the nature of Sputnik’s contents, the commission stresses. However, it should be noted that the country’s security services warned against the website’s being one of Russia’s tools of enforcing its information policy in Lithuania.
In January 2019, Facebook removed hundreds of pages, groups and accounts allegedly linked to Sputnik for engaging in coordinated inauthentic behaviour as part of a network that originated in Russia and operated in the Baltics, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Central and Eastern European countries.
